Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I thank Deputy Bríd Smith. The announcement yesterday was to reduce the cost of public transport. For the first time, it allowed for a 90-minute ticket. The one ticket allows a passenger to go from the DART to a bus to the Luas and back to a bus, for example. It was all about increasing usage and reducing the cost. It is about achieving good connectivity and encouraging people onto public transport. I believe the new arrangement will encourage them. This initiative, combined, in particular, with the 50% reduction we will introduce next year for people under 24, is an example of how we need public transport that is affordable in addition to being reliable and frequent.

I do not have the exact breakdown for the modelling, but the key point is that it is a matter of switching fuels, shifting modal split and reduction. Modelling for ten years into the future is an inexact science. In my mind, I expect we will over-deliver in that regard. To give my personal view, sometimes in our modelling of what happens when good-quality infrastructure, particularly active travel infrastructure, is provided, we do not quite know how to measure. I will give an example. When the cycle route along the Grand Canal, which was of better quality than anything built previously, was introduced, there was an almost immediate 50% jump in cycling journeys on the route. I will give another example. When we recently introduced regular bus services around the Dingle peninsula and something similar in Leitrim, using these areas as testers for the new rural public transport system, there was an immediate response, or an almost immediate doubling in passenger numbers. The Irish public has shown consistently that when high-quality public transport and a safe environment for walking and cycling are provided, they switch. Who wants to be stuck in traffic?

Considering that transport is the hardest aspect to address because of the difficulties with freight and haulage, we may be able to make gains in respect of the shift to active and public transport. People like it. They like being able to be online on a bus. They like the exercise they get and the speed and reliability of cycling and walking. If we can make this form of transport safe and move away from a system that has been dominated for decades by supporting private vehicle transport, we may be surprised about the upside.

I have a thought on electric vehicles. Last week I met the New Zealand Minister. The country is the same size as us with between 5 million and 5.5 million people. New Zealand has 4.5 million cars. While we a large car fleet at over 2 million, we are not as bad as some other countries. I am not sure whether any members were in Glasgow but the city is so road-dominated it would make you weep if you were interested in creating a safe and good local environment. We are not starting from an impossible base. The figure of 1 million EVs is just a very ambitious target effectively to switch the fleet. I think it is possible. It is possible because they are better cars. Within two or three years they will be cheaper in the life-cycle assessment and the maintenance cost especially is only a fraction of that of standard vehicles. I see that coming but do not see it as the be-all and end-all of our decarbonisation of transport. The shift and the reduction are equally important.

The last point was on the national herd. This is a narrative that, as I said, both environmentalists and farmers would be better off moving away from as the only narrative people ever talk about when it comes to decarbonisation of agriculture. We must focus on emissions reductions as a key metric. We must focus on incomes in Irish farming as a key metric. I think that is possible. Going back to what I said earlier, the diversification will come when we pay farmers for rewetting land and restoring peatlands, introducing agroforestry, developing microgeneration and anaerobic digestion and switching to horticulture and to organic farming where you have fewer animals but also less costs because you are not spending so much on incredibly expensive fertiliser. Again, this is the moment for us to strike because the cost of oil and gas being so high has seen the cost of nitrogen fossil-fuel based fertilisers go through the roof. They are incredibly expensive now. This is a moment where we can make that switch. The key thing is to both reduce emissions and increase income.